Elena held her breath and clicked Yes .
vmkfstools -x check /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/FinanceVM/FinanceVM.vmdk The tool spat back: “Disk chain is corrupted. Repair impossible.”
She smiled. Another corrupt VMDK slain. Tomorrow, she’d automate the descriptor backups. fix corrupt vmdk file
By 1:15 AM, the production VM was back online. She attached a note to the ticket: “Root cause: descriptor corruption during storage snapshot. Repaired via third-party converter. Recommend moving to regular VMDK backups + health checks.”
Elena’s phone buzzed at 11:47 PM. The message from her boss was short and sharp: “Production VM down. Corrupt VMDK. Need you now.” Elena held her breath and clicked Yes
She pulled down a copy of StarWind V2V Converter —free, reliable, and known for being stubborn with broken disks. She pointed it to the corrupt descriptor and selected “Local File” as the destination, asking it to convert to a new, healthy VMDK.
She groaned, pulled on a hoodie, and logged into the vSphere cluster from her laptop. The virtual machine in question—a critical finance app server—was frozen. The error was ugly: “Metadata file is corrupt. Cannot open disk.” Another corrupt VMDK slain
Her first attempt was the safe route. She used vmkfstools from the ESXi command line: